We Energies’ planned Oak Creek natural gas plant to produce 1.3M tons of emissions annually

The natural gas plant We Energies plans to build at its Oak Creek power plant campus will produce more than 1.3 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year, according to a new report from state regulators.

The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin filed its environmental assessment on the Oak Creek natural gas plant on Wednesday. It found the plant will produce a little more than a quarter of the emissions that would come from continuing to run the aging coal units at the Oak Creek site that are scheduled to shut down.

Last June, We Energies filed an application with the agency to build a 1,100 megawatt natural gas facility in Oak Creek. The project has an estimated cost of more than $1.2 billion and has not yet been approved by regulators.

The new plant would be located on about 16 acres to the west of the coal-fired Elm Road Generating Station, which came into service in the 2010s on the Oak Creek campus. That campus also includes four coal-fired units that came online in the 1950s and ’60s in the original South Oak Creek Power Plant.

Two of those aging units came offline last year, and two more are expected to shut down this year. We Energies hopes to bring the new natural gas plant online in mid-2028. Elm Road will be converted from coal to gas in a separate project. 

Continuing to use the four older coal units would produce nearly 5 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, about 3.6 million tons more than the natural gas plant, according to the environmental assessment.

Brendan Conway, a spokesperson for We Energies, said the data highlights the utility’s transition toward cleaner energy generation.

“This is part of our continued plan to lower emissions, build more renewables and serve our customers,” he said. “As we go about this transformation of our power generation fleet, we’re investing in a balanced mix of wind, solar, energy storage and natural gas.”

But Ciaran Gallagher, energy and air manager for the nonprofit Clean Wisconsin, said the report’s comparison between aging coal units and the new natural gas plant is flawed because the coal units would likely not operate through the duration of the gas plant’s life.

“It sets up this false choice between coal and gas, whereas the real choice is between gas and clean energies like solar, wind and batteries that are, in many other parts of the country, replacing retiring coal plants,” she said.

Gallagher also said the commission released an environmental assessment and not an environmental impact statement because the gas plant is being proposed on an existing coal site.

“The environmental scrutiny on this project was much lower, simply because they’re reusing the fossil fuel infrastructure footprint,” she said.

The new gas plant in Oak Creek is part of a more than $2 billion investment We Energies plans to make on natural gas infrastructure in southeast Wisconsin. The utility also plans to build a new natural gas plant in Kenosha County, a natural gas storage facility in Oak Creek and a pipeline between Racine, Kenosha and Milwaukee counties.

Conway says those projects are necessary to keep up with increasing demand from development in southeast Wisconsin.

That includes demand from power-hungry data centers. The first phase of Microsoft’s data center campus in Mount Pleasant will need enough energy to power 300,000 homes, and more data centers are planned in Kenosha and Port Washington.

“The backbone of our power generation is going to be solar and wind, battery storage, nuclear power, all these carbon free sources,” Conway said. “But for those times when we cannot meet that need, or when there’s more need than the renewables are able to meet, we’re going to have this natural gas generation.”

But the utility’s slate of projects has faced opposition from environmental groups. They argue the projects will harm the clean energy transition and keep We Energies locked into fossil fuels for years to come.

Gallagher said continuing to burn fossil fuels will continue to worsen the effects of climate change. She says those effects are becoming more apparent in Wisconsin.

“A couple of years ago, the Canadian fires really affected the air quality in Wisconsin and the Midwest,” she said “But we’re also seeing it in less extreme versions, where there’s just no snow on the ground.”